1. Field of the Invention
Implementations described herein relate generally to information retrieval and, more particularly, to providing information in response to a search query.
2. Description of Related Art
The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Locating a desired portion of the information, however, can be challenging. This problem is compounded because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly.
Search engines attempt to return hyperlinks to web pages in which a user is interested. Generally, search engines base their determination of the user's interest on search terms (called a search query) entered by the user. The goal of a search engine is to provide links to high quality, relevant search results (e.g., web pages) to the user based on the search query. Typically, the search engine accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a corpus of pre-stored web pages. Web pages that contain the user's search terms are “hits” and are returned to the user as links.
When a user of an existing search engine receives links to web pages of various web sites, the user is often interested in identifying contact information associated with one or more of the web sites. For example, the user may be interested in identifying contact information for a business that is associated with one of the web sites. In this case, the user may select one of the links in an attempt to find the contact information. In many situations, the contact information is not located on the selected web page. In this case, the user may navigate from this first web page to other web pages on the same web site to attempt to find the desired information. This may involve clicking through a number of web pages until the user is able to find the information of interest.